Roger M. Wilcox's review of

Full Metal Jacket

For those of you who don't know, a "full metal jacket" isn't something you
wear. It's the outer bronze covering that goes on a military bullet, to keep it
from breaking apart or deforming when it hits its target. It turns a rifle into
a "merciful" weapon, as getting hit with a metal-jacketed bullet will "merely"
maim you instead of killing you in most cases.

Thus, in choosing Full Metal Jacket as the title of a movie, you might
think that Stanley Kubrick was making a deep ironic statement, juxtaposing the
horrors of war against politically-inspired attempts to make war seem
"friendly", or some such. Nonsense. Kubrick named this film Full Metal
Jacket as his way of saying, "Guns. Huh huh. Bang bang. Me like. Boom boom.
Look at all the pretty corpses."

The first half of the movie was quite good. It performs a valuable public
service. After seeing the first half of the movie, you will never ever EVER
want to enlist in the military. This may save thousands of bright young people
from turning their young-adulthoods over to a life of endless push-ups. The
drill sargent from Space: Above and Beyond gets his brains blown out and
everything.

But after the first half, things go downhill fast. The "horrors" of Vietnam
consist of a marine infantry unit bungling around in a deserted town lost. The
whole plot of the movie's second half is nothing more than that old, hackneyed
comedy sketch about how guys never ask directions — only with a lot more
gunfire. Bleah. Finally, they end up getting gunned down one by one by a
sniper, whom they finally corner. It turns out to be a prostitute from the
village they just left. Then the journalist hero learns the true meaning of
Christmas. Well, okay, he learns that in the Vietnam war you have to shoot
people, but the moral is basically the same.

My worst gripe concerns the wooden acting in the climactic scene. The cornered
sniper has been wounded and is begging the marines to kill her. Our journalist
hero can hear her moans of pain, and can see the flames of anger burning in his
buddies' eyes for the fallen comrades she's just killed. And what does he do?
He puts on his dullest poker face and drones, "We can't just leave her like
this." I mean he DRONES it. Gah. Not a twinge of nervousness or conflict or
fear or hate in him or anything.

Movies like Full Metal Jacket and Platoon always seem to center
around a hero who comes into the Vietnam war all moralistic and virtuous and
ends up falling into despair. Okay. We get the message. The Vietnam war was
horrible. We know. You can stop sending sweet little patriotic boys off to lose
their innocence. The plot's getting old and predictable. In fact, considering
the amount of TIME it takes for the heroes in these films to stop being perky
rah-rah snotfaces, it almost makes the Vietnam war seem LESS horrifying. At
least Apocalypse Now, for all its overbearing Francis Ford Coppola-ness,
jumps into the war with everybody ALREADY clinically insane, like they should
be.